Download PDF | Liz James - Mosaics, Empresses and Other Things in Byzantium_ Art and Culture 330 - 1453 (Variorum Collected Studies)-Routledge (2024).
239 Pages
This volume consists of 15 articles published between 1991 and 2018. It falls into three sections, reflecting different areas of Liz James’s interests. The first section deals with light and colour and mosaics: four articles considering light and colour in mosaics and the making of mosaics, as well as the question of what it means to define mosaics as ‘Byzantine’, are reprinted. The second brings together four pieces on empresses: their relationships with female personifications and the Mother of God; their roles in founding and refounding buildings; and their employment as ciphers by some authors. Finally, seven papers cover a range of topics: what monumental images of saints in churches might have been for; what the differences between relics and icons might have been; how captions to images can be misleading; why touch was an important sense; how words can sometimes ‘just’ be decorative rather than for reading; why the materiality of objects makes a difference.
There is also a brief section of additional notes and comments which add to, update and reflect on each piece now in 2024. Mosaics, Empresses and Other Things in Byzantium will be of interest to scholars and students alike interested in material culture, the depiction of regal women, and the use of relics and icons in the Byzantine Empire. Liz James is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. She is interested in all things to do with Byzantine art and especially, at the moment, mosaics. Her publications include Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (1996) and Empresses and Power in Early Byzantium (2001), as well as several edited books. Her most recent book is Mosaics in the Medieval World (2017), which contains some great pictures of mosaics.
Preface
One of the first books I ever bought relating to Byzantine Studies was one of the old blue hardcover Variora: Cyril Mango’s Byzantium and Its Image (1984). I suspect it was on special offer on the Ashgate bookstall run by John Smedley at one of the Byzantine Symposia. I now have a rather eclectic collection of about 35 of these; despite advances in technology, they are still useful, a reminder of the huge range of articles and interests that each author encompasses. They are a bit like having a bookshelf on which you find that the article you actually need is next door to the one you thought you wanted. In the days before the internet, the Variorum volumes were wonderful to have as collections of articles (otherwise only accessible as photocopies unless you were based near a library that had all the various periodicals).
But with increasingly straightforward access to material electronically, I made a decision not to include in this volume articles that are relatively easily retrievable for those with that electronic access (nothing from journals, for example, nothing on academia.edu) in the hope that this would make the book useful. In the 1980s, there was a fashion for posters with animals and ‘witty’ or ‘thought-provoking’ slogans. I had one of these.1 It showed a monkey standing on its back legs and peering into the basket of a bicycle, with the slogan ‘I have no particular talent. I am merely extremely inquisitive’.2 That poster remains on my office wall. Although it may say several other things about me, I have also always felt that the slogan encapsulates my work. I was lucky enough to be supervised by Robin Cormack for my PhD – lucky, because Robin liked to question everything and encouraged his students to do the same. Why give an answer when you can ask another question?
The result of that has been that I haven’t felt the need to settle into any one area of Byzantine Studies: I have always been fascinated by all of it (except perhaps law. And warfare. And feudalism. But that’s my problem) and been interested in wondering about what Byzantium might tell us, how we might interpret it. In putting together the studies collected here, I have grouped them into three categories: light, colour and mosaics; empresses; and other stuff; but these were only one way of cutting the cake. Over the years, I have learnt a great deal from so many friends, colleagues, students, scholars, teachers, family, dog. I don’t want to list you all here because it would go on for pages and I would be certain to miss key people out, but thank you all very much for your support and (usually) encouragement – diolch yn fawr iawn. At Routledge, I am grateful to Michael Greenwood for suggesting this and to the team for getting it through production so well. Each paper has been left with its own original reference system, except for Studies 10 and 12, where I have changed the original referencing into footnotes only. I have also left spellings and names as in the original versions. At the end of the papers, I’ve added short comments and a bit of bibliographic updating, though this is neither complete nor exhaustive.
WHAT COLOURS WERE BYZANTINE MOSAICS?
The question, ‘what colours were Byzantine mosaics?’ is one that throws up a variety of hidden problems. Does it mean ‘what colours were the materials of Byzantine mosaics made from?’ or ‘what words should we use in describing the colours of Byzantine mosaics?’ or even ‘what colours did the Byzantines think their mosaics were?’ All are relevant and none are straightforward.1 As far as the issue of how mosaic glass was coloured goes, the technical study of Byzantine mosaics is handicapped by a considerable lack of information of the most basic kind. Little primary source evidence survives to provide answers to questions such as how long it took to put up a Byzantine mosaic, how many people might have been involved, what tools were employed, and even whether there were such things as Byzantine mosaic workshops. Catherine Harding’s work at Orvieto has revealed much about the technology of mosaic making and even something of its economics in fourteenth-century Italy; on the basis of this, it might be permissible to hypothesize about Byzantine mosaics.2 The Orvieto evidence suggests that mosaic workshops existed; consequently, they might have existed in Byzantium. Orvieto offers evidence of a wide range of tools used for mosaic making, from hammers, anvils and a variety of cutting tools to blowpipes, shears and ladles on the glassmaking side; it is reasonable to suggest that similar tools were also used in Byzantium.
From Byzantium itself, however, as yet, excavators and art historians have been little concerned with these questions: the only glass-making site so far excavated in the empire itself is in Corinth in Greece, an area not previously considered to be a centre of glassmaking.3 There is even less data about where the glass and other materials used in the mosaics came from. The lack of evidence for sites for glass-making has led to suggestions that the craft of glass-making was lost in Byzantium during the so-called ‘dark ages’ of the seventh and eighth centuries, and that, instead of manufacturing glass, the Byzantines imported all their needs from the Arab world, combining this with a continual reuse of tesserae. As the same argument could be said of most crafts in Byzantium, for which the only remaining evidence is in the finished pieces, this is not particularly convincing. In addition, in the case of mosaics, the quantity of surviving glass tesserae, not to mention of high-quality enamels sharing many of the same manufacturing techniques, in existence from the ninth century onwards in Byzantium must surely indicate that the manufacture of glass continued.
The scale of mosaic making in the Empire from the IX century on was considerable; Byzantine craftsmen and tesserae were also exported for the construction of the Great Mosque in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, to Kiev, and, almost certainly, to Venice.4 There is little reason to suppose that the Byzantines lacked the skill to make their own materials. Even in surviving mosaics, we have little idea of the compositional nature of tesserae. Relatively few analyses of the composition of tesserae glass (or, indeed, the other materials used in mosaics) have been carried out; much of what evidence there is comes largely from Roman or early Italian glass and not from Byzantium.5 A British Museum project analysed tesserae from Shikmona in Israel (fifth century), Hosios Loukas (eleventh century) and from S. Marco (eleventh to fourteenth century), but remains the only one of its kind.6 The results of this survey were fascinating, suggesting if not necessarily a local industry for each site, then at least a single, separate source of glass for each group. Although the lack of comparative evidence makes it virtually impossible to draw any conclusions from it, the project nevertheless suggests· the potential available for the study of the glass industry in Byzantium and of the mechanics of colouring. It is this lack of technical analysis which presents the most problems in studying the colours of Byzantine mosaics. Technical analysis is crucial for the understanding and study of mosaics. It would allow us to compare mosaics across sites, to talk sensibly about whether manufacture is local or not, and above all, it would offer a frame of reference for describing mosaic colour, a frame of reference which is lacking but which would be very useful in considering mosaics across time and space. In his massive study of the mosaics of S. Marco in Venice, Otto Demus relied almost exclusively on his unrivalled knowledge of style, coupled with some palaeographic study, to date the entire complex, multi-staged schema.
Technical analysis might have gone some way to helping.7 Rather than this, studies of Byzantine mosaics have tended to rely on personal observations from the scaffold, perhaps in the belief that the description of colours is unproblematic. Accounts of the colours in Byzantine mosaics, from Thomas Whittemore’s descriptions of the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, through Diez and Demus on the Byzantine mosaics of Greece, Kitzinger on Sicilian mosaics, Lazarev and Logvin on Russian mosaics, Mouriki on Nea Moni on Chios, rely exclusively on charts and lists of colours, drawn up by scholars in accordance with their own observations.8 These charts look impressive but, in a context outside the monument to which they refer, and even within that monument, are not very effective, for the simple reason that there is no common frame of reference. An early study of the church at Nea Moni identified twelve colours in the mosaics.9 In her analysis of the mosaics at Nea Moni, Mouriki provided a colour chart listing fifty-seven different colours and their various shades.10 Red, for example, is found in two shades, deep and bright. For Hagia Sophia in Kiev, Grigorii Logvin states that there are eighteen groups of colours with 129 gradations, 143 tonal shades and twenty-five variants of gold and silver.11 Viktor Lazarev describes 177 different tints, including twenty-one blues (the same figure as Logvin), twenty-three yellows (to Logvin’s forty-four yellow-brown shades) and nineteen reds (Logvin has thirty-one).12 Whittemore’s description of the imperial panel in the narthex of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul describes thirty-four shades of nine basic colours; Ernest Hawkins has fifty-three colours.13 The problem lies in the imprecision of colour words, especially across languages. It is not clear to which colour each colour word refers. How do the two shades of red seen by Mouriki at Nea Moni relate to the thirty-one seen at Kiev by Logvin? Which reds match Lazarev’s nineteen shades?
Without knowing this, it is impossible to compare colours within monuments, never mind across them. These colour charts based on observations also overlook the technical problem faced by medieval glassmakers generally: Byzantine and western medieval technical knowledge does not seem to have been sufficiently advanced to guarantee the same result each time glass of a particular colour was made. Minor fluctuations in furnace heat or proportions of the raw materials employed could result in varying shades of the same coloured glass being produced from the same furnace at much the same time.14 As a result of all of this, each colour chart works only in the context of the individual report it forms a part of. In other words, if we ask what colour is the mosaic, we cannot get a consistent answer. A tabulation of colours by hue and material is clearly very useful, and a standardisation of colour terms could be achieved relatively easily and at several levels of complexity.
The Munsell colour system, a detailed chart relating colours to each other and coding each, is perhaps the most obvious and widely used.15 However, the Munsell system does present several problems. Differences in media affect the appearance of a colour: a piece of blue glass and a Munsell colour chip are some distance apart. In addition, a single colour does not have a consistent value but is seen in the context of its neighbours and changes both according to that context and with different light, the phenomenon known as simultaneous colour contrast. So, to ‘Munsell’ a mosaic is not easy. This is where the chroma- or colorimeter might come in. This instrument records colour in all three dimensions simultaneously. Placed on a colour, it emits its own, measured light and records the reflection of light back. The reflectance curve of the colour can then be plotted, the pigment identified from its place on that curve and then recorded on a CIE (Commission Internationale de l ‘Eclairage) chart or a Munsell chart through the conversion of the colours to a numerical code.
Once colours are recorded in a standardised way, then this information can be used to provide a great deal of information about mosaics. Issues about artistic practices relating to the development of palettes, the range of colours available at any one period and the standard colourants employed can be addressed; economic issues about the acquisition and manufacture of colourants, stylistic and iconographic questions about patterns of colour use, and comparisons across cultures and time can be raised. Just as style is used to date art, so too could colour and patterns of colour use. It is clear that different colours are emphasised in different periods and in different places across the empire. In fifth- and sixth-century mosaics, blues and greens predominate, as in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the apse of S. Apollinare in Classe, both in Ravenna. Gradually, however, coloured backgrounds are superseded by gold ones; and, in figural composition, blues and especially greens are also replaced with gold. By establishing a standardised way of describing colours, further, less obvious comparisons and conclusions could be drawn. Such uniformity would at least allow us to answer the question ‘what colour is it?’ with the same words meaning the same thing, even across languages. It is one thing to say what colours were used within a mosaic; it is another to think about how and why those colours were used. In a way, only asking ‘what colour is it?’ is the wrong question. ‘
Colour’ itself is not a straightforward term. Studies of colour perception characterise colour as having three components, hue, saturation and brightness.17 Hue is the quality to which most English colour words refer: ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘green’. As the most noticeable aspect of the spectrum, it is the main quality factor in colour. Saturation is the percentage of hue in a colour: is it ‘deep blue’ or ‘yellow-green’? Brightness describes the relative lightness or darkness of a colour: is it ‘bright red’ or ‘dark green’? English-language speakers privilege hue in describing colours: this is the primary aspect of colour which will always be described. The qualities of saturation or brightness are added to the hue value through adjectives such as ‘deep’ or ‘bright’.18 However, the Byzantines were fascinated by colours in a different way; they do not appear to have described colours in the same way that we do.19 Where we describe colour through hue, they focus on it as brightness, glitter, reflectance. Byzantine writings on art and especially on mosaics make it clear that what mattered was the brilliant, glittering effect of colour.20
The aspects of colour stressed include texture, lustre, and transparency, qualities which we would not automatically think to include in answer to the question ‘what colour is it?’ Texts from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries concentrate on aspects such as iridescence and the shining, gleaming qualities, conveying a sense of luxuriance and elation and the dynamism of colour through its concern with flowing, changing effects. The Byzantines write, as Eusebius did, about the dazzling appearance of the church at Tyre, about the beauty of light in the church at Nazianzus, the way in which gold and other colours give brilliance to the whole work in the church of St. Stephen at Gaza, and Paul the Silentiary on Hagia Sophia:
The roof is compacted of gilded tesserae from which a glittering stream of golden rays pours abundantly and strikes men’s eyes with irresistible force. It is as if one were gazing at the midday sun in Spring when it gilds each mountain top.21 The imagined palace of Digenis Akrites contains ‘shining marbles reflecting shafts of light’, whilst Michael Psellos’ account of the Church of St. George of the Mangana describes how the church was like ‘the sky adorned on all sides with golden stars’.22 The mosaics of the Church of the Holy Apostles impress the mind by their varied colours and the ‘brilliance of the gold and the brightness of their hues’ in Nikolaos Mesarites’ narrative.23 These descriptions very rarely tell us what colour a mosaic was in terms that we would expect: indeed Byzantine colour terms, the words for the different colours, also convey qualities of brightness before hue.24 Within a building, what is stressed is the collection and dispersal of light across the scene, and the dazzling visual effects that this created. The sixth-century Byzantine historian, Procopius, wrote of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople: ‘It was singularly full of light and sunshine; you would declare that the place was not lighted by the sun from without, but that the rays are produced within itself, such an abundance of light is poured into this church’.25 As the ninth-century patriarch Photios put it, ‘It is as if one had entered heaven itself with no-one barring the way from any side, and was illuminated by the beauty in all forms shining all around like so many stars. . . . Thenceforth it seems that everything is in ecstatic motion, and the church itself is circling around’.26 To the Russian ambassadors of the ninth century, it was as if the angels had descended from the gold to celebrate the liturgy.
It was the glittering, sparkling effect of mosaic that was most admired, as was light created by space as well as by colour. These apparently aesthetic descriptions of light and colour in texts have thrown up some problems.27 Byzantine texts have been seen as rhetorical pieces, products of a dead literary tradition in which someone speaking about art and describing art uses the conventions of rhetoric rather than his own perceptions of the object. Thus, for example, the texts cited above all describe light because descriptions of light form a part of the rhetoric for describing art. The speaker has not necessarily looked at the work in question but prefers to deal in the preconceptions of rhetoric. Such a view takes a very negative approach to rhetoric. Studies of Byzantine rhetoric show that it was not a dead convention but a vital and organic form of communication.28 Although there were standard templates for types of speeches, the skill of the rhetorician lay in adapting these templates to the particular circumstances, whilst still retaining the parallels with the template. To dismiss descriptions of light simply as rhetorical topoi ignores the different ways in which authors employed these topoi for different effects.29 It also ignores the argument that concepts become cliches only because they encapsulate a pertinent structure of thought relevant in a particular society.30 Paul the Silentiary’s use of light, for example, is very different to the ways in which the twelfth-century author, Michael the Deacon, uses it in his account of Hagia Sophia: the former uses it to convey the newness of the building, the latter its renewal.31
What accounts of works of art do, however, is give an account less of what an object looked like and more of how it was perceived or how it should be perceived.32 What is selected for comment and the nature of that comment affords some indication of the significant aspects of a work of art. When a writer comments on light, therefore, this is because light mattered, because it was a feature worthy of remark, not simply because it was something the author was supposed to include. The other side of this debate about the relevance of accounts of works of art to the actuality of art works is to examine mosaic techniques to see if these indicate a similar emphasis on light and light effects.33 It is apparent that brightness and reflectance are qualities deliberately enhanced through technical devices employed by mosaicists. Each glass tessera is a mirror, reflecting light back. By manually laying these on uneven surfaces, light can be reflected in a variety of ways; indeed, in different lights, the same mosaic may appear completely different in its colours and visual effect. Mosaics were placed in carefully constructed squinches and pendentives, in curved apses, in domes, all areas designed for the reflection and refraction of light. Even on flat surfaces, curved setting beds were employed to allow a greater play of light. Tesserae are laid in different ways and in different directions within the same mosaic, which has the effect of breaking up light and creating a glittering effect. In the thirteenth-century Deesis panel in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, the tesserae of the gold background are laid in a rippling trefoil pattern, which diffuses light; in the ninth-century apse mosaic in the same church, silver tesserae are interspersed with the gold background to disrupt an otherwise monochrome gleaming golden sheet. They also appear to be laid at slightly different angles, thus enhancing the effect even further. The very nature of mosaic encourages an aesthetic of light.34
The effect of mosaic is gained from its scale and construction which is designed to use the play of light on an undulating surface. No mosaic is ever the same for long; as light changes, so too does the colour and appearance of the mosaic. It acts as a skin for the wall; it is subservient to the shape of a building and affected by the different angles of surfaces and the different degrees of illumination as light changes. Above all, light striking a mosaic acts as a dynamic force, a force which has to be carefully and deliberately employed by the mosaicist. The Byzantines exploited this to the full, combining geodesy, the art of measuring volume and surface, with optics to work on a careful planning and placing of mosaics. For example, in Byzantine art, light tends to be projected from in front and above the picture. In the Deesis panel from Hagia Sophia, where real light comes from windows to the viewer’s left and above, the direction of this light is represented pictorially: a shadow line runs across Christ’s neck, from the right-hand side of his jaw, the shadow cast by a real jaw in real light from this direction.
The use of colour and light in the conch depicting the Anastasis at Nea Moni means that the gold and blue figure of Christ collects and reflects light, dominating and illuminating the scene. It seems impossible to believe that mosaicists were not aware of these effects, that light was not deliberately used to create space and colour, and formed an intrinsic part of monumental art and its display, in the same ways that other techniques for dealing with issues such as distance and scale were employed. Without an awareness of how the mosaic would interact with the different forms of lighting within that church, of how light would activate the mosaic, then the mosaicist ran the risk of killing the mosaic.35 Texts and images together offer, I believe, a shared aesthetic amongst Byzantines from all levels of society. Whether this shared aesthetic extended into a shared perception of the mystical properties of light, an idea popular in religious thinking from Pseudo-Dionysius on, is another issue. There seems no reason to think not. Henry Maguire’s work has demonstrated convincingly how the artistic imagination was influenced in various ways, both stylistic and iconographic, by sermons and hymns from the ninth century on.36 As Maguire has shown, a Byzantine artist would have been exposed to sermons and hymns on a regular basis during the course of church services. Not only that, there is some evidence – inscriptions on church walls and in manuscripts – to suggest a level of literacy among artists, which might also have affected their reception of such works. Further, educated patrons might also have played a part in the transfer of rhetorical images to art.37
Just as the iconography of homilies could enter the artistic repertoire, so too it is perfectly plausible that mosaicists were aware, not necessarily at a highly sophisticated level, of the metaphysical ideas in religious thinking about divine illumination. If nothing else, they were used to portraying divine light in scenes such as the Transfiguration. Perhaps the most important thing, however, about the colour of a Byzantine mosaic was not what colour it was but that it was coloured rather than monochrome. Colour and form are explicitly linked in Byzantine thought, for colours create the animate form.38 Gregory of Nyssa made the point explicitly: ‘In the art of painting, the material of the different colours fills out the representations of the model. But anyone who looks at the picture that has been completed through the skilful use of colours does not stop with the mere contemplation of the colours that have been painted on the tablet; rather he looks at the form which the artist has created in colours’.39 The fourth-century patriarch, John Chrysostom, wrote ‘who the emperor is, and who the enemy, you do not know exactly until the true colours have been applied, making the image clear and distinct’ for ‘as long as somebody traces the outline as in a drawing, there remains a sort of shadow; but when he paints over it brilliant tints and lays on colours then an image emerges’.40 The image is not present and identifiable until colour is added. The role of colour in making the image lifelike is stressed in a variety of Byzantine texts. In his homily on the dedication of the image of the Virgin and Child in Hagia Sophia, Patriarch Photios explains how a painting that is in agreement with religious truth contains the essence of the prototype, which is apprehended through sight and that apprehension is through colour.41
Colour is a part of this truth; it presents the ‘real archetype’. Byzantine writings on art make it clear that aesthetics lead the viewer to contemplate the events shown, to become a part of them, looking at them with eyes of the sense and understanding them with eyes of the soul, to weep in front of the image as so many Byzantine writers tell us that they did. Spiritual truth resides in art: descriptions of works of art help us to realise this, but when confronted with the objects themselves, it is one of the hardest things to remember. Mosaic is not there just to look beautiful; the tricks are not there because it makes the mosaic look good; they serve a purpose. It is no accident that light is collected in the middle of the niche of the Annunciation in Daphni; it is deliberate that the Pantokrator mosaic there is ringed in light. And, of course, the same is true for other art forms. This may seem some distance from the question of what colours were Byzantine mosaics, but, whilst an understanding of the technical aspect of mosaic colours is crucial, as important is to understand what colours and why – what colours meant in Byzantium. As the property that defines form, colour is the essential element of Byzantine art; without knowing what colour it is, and why, we cannot hope to understand that art.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق